re the oldsters, bearers of famous
names some of them, who had learned politics as a trade and followed it
as a profession. Almost to a man they were professional office holders,
professional handshakers, professional silver tongues. And against them
were pitted a greedy, hungry group of younger men, less showy perhaps in
their persons, less picturesque in their manner of speech, but filled
each one with a great yearning for office and power; and they brought to
the aid of their vaulting ambitions a new and a faultlessly running
machine. From the outset the Evening Press had championed the cause of
the old crowd--the state-house ring as the enemy called it, when they
didn't call it something worse. We championed it not as a Northern or an
Eastern paper might, in a sedate, half-hearted way, but fiercely and
wholly and blindly--so blindly that we could see nothing in our own
faction but what was good and high and pure, nothing in the other but
what was smutted with evil intent. In daily double-leaded editorial
columns the chief preached a Holy War, and in the local pages we fought
the foe tooth and nail, biting and gouging and clawing, and they gouged
and clawed back at us like catamounts. That was where the hard work fell
upon Devore. He had to keep half his scanty staff working on politics
while the other half tried to cover the run of the news.

If I live to be a thousand years old I am not going to forget the state
convention that began at two o'clock that muggy September afternoon at
Lyric Hall up on Washington Street in the old part of the town. Once
upon a time, twenty or thirty years before, Lyric Hall had been the
biggest theater in town. The stage was still there and the boxes, and at
the back there were miles--they seemed miles anyway--of ancient,
crumbling, dauby scenery stacked up and smelling of age and decay. Booth
and Barrett had played there, and Fanny Davenport and Billy Florence.
Now, having fallen from its high estate, it served altered
purposes--conventions were held at Lyric Hall and cheap masquerade balls
and the like.

The press tables that had been provided were not, strictly speaking,
press tables at all. They were ordinary unpainted kitchen tables, ranged
two on one side and two on the other side at the front of the stage,
close up to the old gas-tipped footlights; and when we came in by the
back way that afternoon and found our appointed places I was struck by
certain sinister facts. Usually w